Barbecues: a South African speciality? Photograph: Profile Press/Rex Features

Some time around one million years ago, a couple of the brighter members of homo erectus carried some wood 30 metres inside their cave in South Africa, lit a fire and sat down to a cooked meal. We know this because a team of scientists from Boston University, led by Francesco Berna, have discovered the burned bones and ashes of plant material created by what appears to be a controlled fire.

This may have all sorts of important archaeological and evolutionary implications as the ashes pre-date the previous oldest evidence for man-made fires, at a site in Israel, by 200,000 years. But it also throws up one striking and rather less scientific ramification: the randomness of accreditation.

Think about it. Until a few days ago, the world happily believed that wood-fired cuisine probably started in the Middle East and now that whole theory has been blown out the water. That branch of early man has gone from being "world leader" to "also-ran" in the blink of an eye. Imagine finding a remote tribe in Papua New Guinea who had invented the television 200,000 years ago and had been watching EastEnders for just as long. John Logie Baird reduced to a footnote and the whole history of the mass media in urgent need of a rewrite.

Nor is it likely that the South Africans of Wonderwerk Cave will retain their primacy indefinitely. According to Richard Wrangham, a Harvard professor of biological anthropology, it was the invention of cooking that was one of the determining factors in the evolution of homo habilis to homo erectus as humans no longer had to waste hours chewing their way through tough raw food. And as the split from homo habilis to homo erectus took place 1.9 million years ago, there's clearly another 900,000 years of cookery that's as yet unaccounted for.

It's at times like this, I'm reminded why I was never cut out to be a scientist because while I can quite see the importance of evidence-based research into the big questions, it's the detours into the rather more trivial questions that I often find the most fascinating. Does it really matter if the first people to cook food did so in Israel or South Africa? Almost certainly not. What matters is that someone, somewhere, did it.

Even so, I would still like to know who really were the first people to make themselves a barbecue. Not because it advances our knowledge of the world, but because I like to see the right people getting the credit for their inventions. While we're sitting here now thinking how brilliant the South Africans must have been for working out how to control an indoor fire, it's equally possible that what the South Africans themselves were really thinking was: "Our ancestors have been smoking out the cave for hundreds of thousands of years and there's got to be a better way of cooking than this. How long will it be before someone invents the Baby Belling."

I'd also like to know how the first barbecuers came up with the idea. Fire had been around for billions of years before anyone worked out how to harness it; so who had the inspiration that it could be controlled. And how many humans burned themselves to death before it was generally accepted as a good idea that could catch on. And is it possible the reason we haven't discovered any prior evidence of man-made fires is because some branches of homo erectus had a hyper-vigilant health and safety inspectorate who went around ensuring that anyone acting irresponsibly with fire was clubbed to death and eaten?

Nor is it just fire. The same questions occur to me about water. That's been around as long as fire, but who first worked out it was quite nice to have a wash? Then there's the wheel. The earliest wheeled vehicles are generally credited to the Mesopotamians and central Europeans around 4000BC, but who can say for certain there wasn't a bloke around somewhere 1,000 years before who was toying with the idea of building a primitive cart only to be laughed at by his family with a "You don't want to do that. It will never work."

Ultimately, of course, we can only be certain about those things for which we have empirical evidence. And if we've happened to be unlucky or have looked in the wrong place, then that's just tough on our ancestors. They should have been as careful at protecting their legacy as we are. But then maybe the South Africans always wanted to keep their role quiet. Thanks to them, we now have the microwaveable heat-up meal. Homo erectus would be turning in his cave.